Leonora Carrington

“I do miss England. Well, I miss the idea of England, I think. But I haven't been back for years. I probably just miss the past.”

“Everyone's had an interesting life. Unless they're interested in business or something.”

“In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world's stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health.”

“You don't decide to paint. It's like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It's a need, not a choice.”

“What would anyone want to write about me for? I'm just an old lady.”

“I have always thought - and a lot of people won't agree with this - that we're incredibly driven by fear, basically. Aren't we? It's awful to be frightened. I think it's a very strong, very powerful thing, fear.”

“I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.”

“I never thought of myself as a Surrealist. I didn't think of myself as anything. I try not to. We all have these egos.”

“I hated being in a convent. It's another form of power. Manipulation. Because who can say - one God for the whole universe? I think there must be millions of gods! And they're not all of them very nice.”

“We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.”

“I suppose what I believe in is peaceful anarchy.”

“If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”

“You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name.”

“Sentimentality is a form of fatigue.”

“Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”

“I am as mysterious to myself as I am mysterious to others.”

“I didn't have time to be anybody's muse; I was too busy rebelling against my parents and learning to be an artist.”

“One is born, one lives, one dies. What death is, I don't know.”